Electrons, when they were first discovered, behaved exactly like particles or bullets, very simply. Further research showed, from electron diffraction experiments for example, that they behaved like waves. As time went on there was a...

My intention was to enroll at McGill University but an unexpected series of events led me to study physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force...

The determination of the average man is not merely a matter of speculative curiosity; it may be of the most important service to the science of man and the social system. It ought necessarily to...

The answer to the ancient question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.

When I was young, I thought it is thunder that kills people. But when I learnt physics in the high school, I discovered that it is rather the lightning that does the killing. The voice...

Alpha sets the scale of nature — the size of atoms and all things made of them, the intensity and colors of light, the strength of magnetism, and the metabolic rate of life itself. It...

Another very good test some readers may want to look up, which we do not have space to describe here, is the Casimir effect, where forces between metal plates in empty space are modified by...

Objects moving in a circle are under the influence of changing force.

Good metaphysics has its roots in good physics.

…in principle, one can predict everything in the universe solely from physical laws. Thus, the long-standing ‘first cause’ problem intrinsic in cosmology has been finally dispelled.

You can never repeal the laws of physics, and a smaller, lighter vehicle is always at a disadvantage no matter how many safety features are built into it.

Perhaps there are many “nows” of varying duration, depending on just what it is we are doing. We must face up to the fact that, at least in the case of humans, the subject experiencing...

The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don’t think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them

We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting...

Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted...

knowledge” of angels, and he devoted far more of his massive Summa Theologica to them than to physics.

Everyone now agrees that a physics lacking all connection with mathematics … would only be an historical amusement, fitter for entertaining the idle than for occupying the mind of a philosopher.

From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics...

[Regarding mathematics,] there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy. This may be true; indeed it is probable, since the sensational triumphs of Einstein, that stellar...

The great object is to find the theory of the matter [of X-rays] before anyone else, for nearly every professor in Europe is now on the warpath.

There is a philosophy that says that if something is unobservable — unobservable in principle — it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs...

Time break the laws of physics.

I was there!”-surely that is the answer to God’s question. For no matter how the universe came into being, most of the atoms in these fleeting assemblies that we think of as our bodies have...

If one is working from the point of view of getting beauty into one’s equation, … one is on a sure line of progress.

Physics isn’t the most important thing. Love is.

The universe as a giant harpstring, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I supposed?

Time and space were, from Death’s point of view, merely things that he’d heard described. When it came to Death, they ticked the box marked Not Applicable. It might help to think of the universe...

The more I study physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics.

A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a ‘physicist’ and does ‘physics’ and physical experiments with abstract concepts.

Conclusive evidence. A recent Scientific American article hailed New Physics as a surer path to Godthan religion itself.

In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics.

Unassuming in manner, genial and kindly in his intercourse with his fellow-men, never showing impatience or irritation, devoid of personal ambition of the baser sort or of the slightest desire to exalt himself… In the...

It is curious that the human mind could blindly accept an infinite speed but had reservations to accept a finite one, simply because it was too large!

[The fine structure constant] … defines how firmly atomic nuclei bind together and how all the atoms on Earth were made. Its value controls the power from the Sun and, more sensitively, how stars transmute...

Ronan didn’t need physics. He could intimidate even a piece of plywood into doing what he wanted.

The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have...

There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature’s actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained ‘fine structure constant’ … governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions, ….

Wolfgang Pauli, in the months before Heisenberg’s paper on matrix mechanics pointed the way to a new quantum theory, wrote to a friend, “At the moment physics is again terribly confused. In any case, it...

A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.

Each of us is aware he’s a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws. It can only hate them....

Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.

The atom can’t be seen, yet its existence can be proved. And it is simple to prove that it can’t ever be seen. It has to be studied by indirect evidence — and the technical...

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.

The highest court is in the end one’s own conscience and conviction—that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist—and before any science there is first of all belief.

The fine structure constant is undoubtedly the most fundamental pure (dimensionless) number in all of physics. It relates the basic constants of electromagnetism (the charge of the electron), relativity (the speed of light), and quantum...

Nature is not embarrassed by difficulties of analysis. She avoids complication only in means. Nature seems to be proposed to do much with little: it is a principle that the development of physics constantly supports...

There is no logical staircase running from the physics of 10-28 cm. to the physics of 1028 light-years.

Physics is the story of matter, with strings or particles.